On July 26 last year, the Industrial Court issued an award on a dispute that infrequently comes up in that judicial venue, although since the emergence of the covid epidemic it appears more frequently in courts and tribunals throughout the Commonwealth that share our common-law foundation of jurisprudence.

I refer to the issue of mental illness during employment. It comes up in actual (de facto) practice on a more frequent basis than it would appear, because when it manifests itself as threatened or actual violence on the job, the reason for dismissal is labelled "violence" or "fighting on the job," not mental illness.

Mental illness is not something most HR/IR professionals are trained to diagnose or to handle. Indeed, most medical practitioners are not, either, so on the job they retreat into the binary construct established by legal systems.

"Mental illness" in the psychiatric dictionary includes depression. Normal human beings get depressed, irritated, anxious, worried, fed up and off balance from time to time, especially, in TT, when traumatised by gunshots, traffic foul-ups, marital or domestic violence, on a daily or periodic basis. It appears on a sliding scale from minor to extreme.

This kind of depression, or that commonly referred to as 'post-alcoholic' or 'a hangover,' which is your brain trying to recover from alcoholic damage, or the hormone fluctuations from a sudden rush of testosterone or oestrogen in males and or females (apparently we both are prone to both) are not generally considered disabling mental illness, unless, of course, the stress caused to an individual's nervous system slides them from one end of the scale to the other.

When it does do so, however, it is associated with impaired functioning. There is no hard and fast distinction when an employee, a manager or a fellow worker has crossed the line, as it varies from person to person. It can be very noticeable, however, to people with whom one works or just interacts regularly, as there can be sudden changes in behaviour, extreme reactions to normal events or a withdrawal from all normal interaction.

In the case under scrutiny here, a concerned worker employed by National Gas Company at Beach Camp, in 2020 brought to the attention of the company that a fellow employee, who had been absent on February 25 (the day after Carnival), had been putting some pretty frightening postings during that time on social media. They were, and I quote from the judgment: "several seemingly incoherent messages with possible references to violence against employees of the company.'

Any experienced IR professional will immediately pick up three core references, none of them decisive in itself, but cumulatively they are significant.

First is a possible threat of violence against employees of the company. No such reference can be ignored by any IR or security professional.

Second, the mention of Carnival. People in our culture are heavy drinkers over Carnival, whether they play mas or not, hence the possibility of one form of mental dis